The cost of manufacturing mechanical, electrical and electromechanical products has been reduced over the years by the increasing use of industrial automation. However, when such techniques are utilized for assembling parts, they normally involve the use of robots or other relatively expensive and sophisticated equipment.
In particular, a recently developed technique used in industrial automation is the APOS parts presentation technology developed by Sony Corporation. This technology involves dumping a quantity of parts of a given type onto a specially designed pallet. The pallet has depressions machined into its surface that allow the parts to fit in the depressions only in a predetermined one or more orientations. As the pallet is vibrated, randomly-oriented parts eventually find their way into these depressions. When enough parts have been passed across the pallet, most of the depressions are filled and the pallet moves on to the next step in the assembly process. With the APOS technology, this step may be an assembly step which is performed by a robot which picks parts out of the pallet and performs the assembly operation.
While the APOS technology, and other existing industrial automation procedures, can result in substantial savings over performing the same assembly operations manually, further savings could be effected if expensive robotic or other sophisticated assembly equipment could be replaced with less expensive technology.